Miami

It was a long time ago. In January 1989, we sat together for the first time in a bar on Ocean Drive. The Avalon Hotel, our front-row dosshouse at the time, still welcomes guests, but now looks much better and presents itself as a beautifully restored Art Deco gem. The hotel's terrace is still one of the best places to watch the crazy hustle and bustle on Ocean Drive.

For us back then, Miami was just South Beach, 365 days of sunshine a year, beaches, parties - and nothing else. Our radius of movement was no more than two kilometers. With one exception: once we went to a Miami Heat home game, at the time still at the Miami Arena. We took a wrong exit and ended up just a few hundred meters from the arena in a nasty no-go area. The old arena has long since been demolished, there's a supermarket on the site and the entire area in and around downtown is unrecognizable.

New hotspot Downtown
Miami has long been more than just a beach and has developed into a vibrant metropolis with a lively art, culture and gastronomy scene. Around two blocks away from the site of the former sports and concert hall stands the almost outdated American Airlines Arena, and new hotels have opened. An attractive museum landscape with a museum park, the Miami Science Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), a flagship of modern art that can stand as a symbol for Miami as a young, vibrant city and melting pot of cultures, has been created. The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, which opened in 2006 and includes the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall and the Carnival Studio Theater, is also located here. Downtown Miami has thus been enormously upgraded and will be even more so once the new Paramount Miami Worldcenter, which began construction in March 2017, is completed. The complex - apartments, offices, hotels, restaurants, stores - is set to become the new center with a pedestrian zone based on the European model. The city of millions seems to be constantly reinventing itself. Even local transport has seen some changes. For example, there is the Miami Metromover, a free elevated train that runs mainly in the center of Miami and is even used by car-loving Americans.
In the immediate vicinity of downtown is Wynwood with its Art District, "one of Miami's trendiest, up and coming neighborhoods", which attracts the scene with over 70 galleries and numerous trendy restaurants and bars. It was only at the beginning of December that the
Miami Beach, Art Basel made a stop here again. Since 2002, Art Basel, which attracts major artists from all over the world, has not only been held at the Miami Beach Convention Center and numerous other locations in Miami Beach, but also in Wynwood, for example.

Art, design and the world of finance
The art fair has thus made a decisive contribution to the development of the neighborhood. More than 20 different art festivals now take place in the first week of December. The "Wynwood Walls", an area with numerous painted and spray-painted house walls, is also considered one of the largest open-air installations of street art in the world. And where there is art, the fashion world is not far away either, which likes to celebrate lavish parties during Art Basel. Near the Art District, the historic part of Buena Vista in the Miami Design District is still under construction: A kind of open-air shopping mall with luxury brands has been created, spiced up with interesting works of art, exhibition spaces as well as cafés and restaurants. On the other side of downtown in Brickell, things are really booming and humming. One skyscraper after another is going up at an incredible pace, hotel after hotel is opening and apartments are being sold in no time at all. This once inconspicuous district also wants to become Miami's new center - the financial center already is. It is staking its claim, for example, with the Brickell City Center, which is not only home to the new EAST Hotel and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, but has also just opened Miami's newest mall. Brickell is already considered chic despite the ongoing massive construction work, and some of the hippest restaurants and nightlife addresses are now located here. And the predominant language is Spanish, as is unmistakable at midnight on the packed roof terrace of Sugar. No wonder: "Miami is the capital of Latin America", as our Turkish waiter at the Traymore restaurant in the Hotel Metropolitan by Como puts it. But in Brickell you can also see one of the most obvious differences between Miami and Miami Beach: While the standard look in Miami Beach consists of flip-flops, shorts, shirts or tops at best, men and women in the city dress smart, modern and rather formal. Shirts and jackets are just as much a part of the outfit as tight dresses and high heels.

Hotel catwalk Miami Beach
But back to Miami Beach. It's more than just a beach or a place. Miami Beach, which is an independent municipality, is located on a narrow, elongated island or spit of land off the coast and stretches from South Beach in the far south around 15 kilometers north to Bal Harbour. South Beach has always been a hot spot, Ocean Drive the catwalk on which everyone shows off, the stage on which the party takes place. After a boom in the 1950s and 1960s, the rest of Miami Beach had not only lost its glamor for a long time, but there was also a lack of guests. Mid Beach and North Beach were rather dreary. But the tide has turned and the Miami Beach lifestyle has steadily moved north in recent years. New hotels have been built whose architecture is once again based on Art Deco, such as the W South Beach. In some cases, houses from the 1950s have been renovated and converted into new luxury residences. One of these is the Seville, which stood empty for twelve years and was reopened in 2014 as the Miami Beach Edition. Even the legendary Fontainebleau, built in the 1950s by "the" Miami Beach architect Morris Lapidus, was renovated and extended in 2008 at a cost of over one billion US dollars. The hotel boom was followed by new stores, restaurants, clubs - in short, new life and new splendor. Art Basel has also contributed to this. And Miami Beach continues to benefit from art. The Bass, the new museum for contemporary art, will open on Collins Avenue in 2017.

And The Show Goes On
So the development is far from over. The good locations between Collins Avenue and the mile-long, wide, fine sandy beach are so sought-after and hard to come by that the luxury hotel industry is moving further and further north. Four Seasons opened its new resort in Surfside at the beginning of 2017. Ritz Carlton and St. Regis are already present in Bal Harbour, which has long since developed into a more sedate alternative to South Beach with its upmarket boutiques and small cafés and restaurants. And then there are the other, less lively but all the more charming districts of Miami, such as the island of Key Biscayne (famous for the important Miami Open tennis tournament), Coconut Grove and Coral Gables. Despite their boom times, they have retained their very own character and are perfect places for a rather quiet stay in Miami. Ivan Bauza, Director of Sales & Marketing at The Setai Hotel in South Beach, is convinced of this. "Miami is really just a huge airport that constantly spits out people and serves a wide variety of scenes and locations," he says with conviction.

Photo: © Mandarin Oriental, Miami

Highlights

Connoisseur special tip:

ART BASEL MIAMI
The Swiss import hit is called Art Basel Miami. In the alpine country, weighty collectors wander from stand to stand with a deliberate expression, in Miami lightness is the trump card, the set meals in Basel mutate into wild parties. The art is the same, 200 of the world's best galleries show stars and newcomers in the Convention Center. But the whole of South Beach mutates into an art venue: containers on the beach, designed by avant-garde architects, in which 20 up-and-coming gallery owners reveal their view of things, are just as much a part of it as a video lounge in the Botanical Gardens.

www.artbasel.com

DIPLOMATISCHE VERTRETUNGEN

in Germany
American Embassy
Clayallee 170, 14191 Berlin
Tel: +43 30 83050
www.de.usembassy.gov

in Austria
Embassy of the United States
Boltzmanngasse 16, 1090 Vienna
Phone: +43 1 313390
Fax: +43 1 3100682
www.at.usembassy.gov

Lage

USA

Fläche

9 834 000 km² (Miami 143,1 km²)

Bevölkerung

318,9 Millionen Einwohner, (Miami 417 650)

Sprache

keine Sprache als Amtssprache benannt, de facto Englisch

Hauptstadt

Washington D.C. (658 893 inhabitants)

Religion

No official register of the religious status of residents

Weather

Tropisches Klima mit heißen, feuchten Sommern und warmen, trockenen Wintern. Von Anfang Juni bis Ende November läuft die Hurricane Season.

Beste Reisezeit

Frühling, die Temperaturen sind angenehm warm und es gibt nur wenige Regentage

Klima

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Max. Temperaturen	23	24	25	26	28	30	31	31	30	28	26	24
Min. Temperaturen	15	15	17	19	21	23	23	24	23	21	17	15
Sonnenstunden	8	8	9	9	9	8	8	8	7	7	8	7
Regentage	6	5	4	5	8	13	13	14	15	13	6	3

Zeitverschiebung

Mitteleuropäische Zeit (MEZ) –6 Stunden (New York) bzw. –9 Stunden (Kalifornien) bzw. –10 Stunden (Alaska) bzw. –11 Stunden (Hawaii).
In den USA gilt vom ersten Sonntag im April bis zum letzten Sonntag im Oktober die Daylight Saving Time, d.h. die Uhr wird um 1 Stunde vorgestellt.

Währung

Dollar

Vaccinations

none